Portland activists demand freedom for Palestinian ICE detainee
Tacoma, WA – 15 Portland for Palestine organizers traveled up to the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, Washington on Saturday, June 13. Portland for Palestine (P4P) was there to promote their ongoing campaign to help free a local Palestinian immigrant Tareq Zakarneh, a man who has been in ICE detention for over two years.
These organizers joined the Tacoma-based immigrant rights group La Resistencia for one of its regularly-held “Solidarity Days.” Overall, there were about 50 people in attendance.
Zakarneh has mostly been held at the NWDC, though recently DHS and ICE have been trying to break his resolve and remove him from the U.S. The U.S. does not recognize Palestinian statehood, so he is in danger of being deported to Israel. Any Palestinian deportee in the hands of the Israeli authorities is in grave danger as Israel pushes to complete their project of ethnic cleansing in the region.
P4P wanted to make sure that DHS’s underhanded, illegal tactics don’t go unnoticed with regards to Zakarneh, and tragically, so many other immigrants. Since his removal from NWDC on June 2, ICE has made Zakarneh impossible to track and taken away his rights to communication with the outside world.
On June 5, P4P mobilized and conducted an emergency call-in campaign to Judge David Estudillo’s office to demand he allow Tareq the rights of due process. And it worked! A last-second order issued by the Washington judge got Zakarneh pulled off his final deportation flight while he was waiting to board early in the morning on June 9.
The group further mobilized to show solidarity with detainees still unjustly locked away in NWDC. They also sought to send a message to the facility’s operators, the infamous GEO Group.
Kacey Desantis, organizer for P4P, commented on the conditions in NWDC and others. From her speech delivered that day, “Tareq has often told us of the atrocious quality of the food and water and about how ICE would not give Tareq nor his fellow Muslim detainees the appropriate time and space to practice their religion. On hot days, there is often no air conditioning. He was denied access to legal materials and legal representation on multiple occasions. When Tareq was detained in a facility in Eloy, Arizona, he was denied his right to meet with lawyers at least six times.”
Zakarneh often found himself a target of extraordinary abuse and deprivation by ICE and the operators of these facilities. Why? In their own words, they deem him a “nuisance” for daring to engage in jailhouse lawyering. Not only is he extremely active in fighting in his own defense, but he has been critical in helping, with self-filed motions, to ultimately get several of his fellow detainees released. The more he helped others, the more ICE would attempt to isolate him.
At the event, organizer Cole Dunahugh said, “We demand that Tareq be brought back to the NWDC so he can be allowed to argue his case in person in front of a judge, that he be granted asylum, and that he be released from ICE detention.”
It is critical that we stand up to protect immigrants of all nationalities. But Palestinians require special attention as ICE deports them exclusively to Tel Aviv, where they face possible long-term internment, torture and even extra-judicial execution.
Desantis closed out her speech, “The ICE facilities in this country and the Israeli prisons that Tareq faces are connected. The violence of the American immigration system and the apartheid system that is killing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are connected. They are connected by an imperial system that inflicts and promotes violence abroad, learns the best ways to do it and brings it home to the U.S.”